OK, Iíve been outsourced three times while working for a large international company. The first time I was struck by the fact that when I left there were three people replacing my job function.
The second- time several years later- I was outsourced and this time there were over five people in the same function. The third and final time was critical for me as I was too old to consider looking for work. Alas I was consumed by the outsource but allowed to continue to work at the same function with the appropriate reductions in pay and benefits.
But Walla! This time, being the most knowledgeable and senior I was able to divide up the work day with my other cohorts so that each of us only work two hours a day for the same pay! So next time youíre faced with outsourcing, consider infiltrating!
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I worked for an outbound call center that aggressively slammed real estate agents on marketing products.

Every morning at 6am we had a team meeting with about 40 people all standing around our cubicles.

One particular morning my manager, a 5'8" has been football player whose head connected directly with his shoulders yells at me in a very Vin Diesel "Boiler Room" Moment, "Davis, what the hell are you wearing!? You have f***** us all. We are going to have a terrible day in sales!"

I was silent and thought he was merely being rhetorical, he yells again demanding, "what the hell is on that shirt!?

That day was in fact one terrible day in sales. Later that night I get a call on my phone with a message from my boss, "Thanks for F****** us today with your G** A** shirt, you are never allowed to wear that S*** again"

I showed up the next day with a purple, pink and blue pattern flannel looking shirt that he hated even more!
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I contracted with a teambuilding company - something like Outward Bound, but not at all as professional. This company solely focused on working with companies ranging from Fortune 500s to small local businesses. We would create 1/2 day to 3 days programs for these companies so that they could challenge their groups, sales forces, managers, etc. We would use group challenges and high ropes course events to build team communication, time management and stronger leadership. We helped to build better teams.

The President of the company that I contracted with was not a team player. His introductions to the groups would always include his tales of how he got started and how his employees and company rallyed around each other and made a wonderful team.

But the reality was much different. He hired young people and family members. He dictated his will. He failed to communicate clearly and expected you to know what he was thinking. For instance, an employee - his nephew - was instructed via notes on a napkin to build an outdoor ropes course. One of the challenge events was to be an 8 foot wall between two trees. The nephew went out, built the wall by himself using 2 x 8 boards. When he finished, the President (his Uncle) came out to the property looked at the wall and said "Hmmmmm... we need to raise this entire wall 5 more inches." The man was like the character Vizzini from The Princess Bride.

My personal story is when I was hired to Tech (gopher) for the President's own program. The event was to happen on a Friday in the mountains about 6 hours or more away from our office.

Communication failures - The President left no schedule or agenda so I had to pack his program by calling around to get ideas for what he might want. I found out that one event he wanted was a bosun's chair. I had no idea what that was, but found out that I would need to (1) find a large ditch on the property, (2) rig safely two cables across the ditch, and (3) secure a swing (the bosun's chair) to the cables so that the chair would become the way to transport people over the ditch.

Long story short... I was expected to pack for a program that I had no idea what it would entail, know about some items that I had no idea what they even were, know the layout of property that I had never been to, and make sure that the President was kept informed of all that was going on.

Once I got to the property, I scouted the area at night in the dark. Next morning, in sleet no less, I set everything that I could up except the bosun thing. Then with my hands numb, I went to ask the President when he would be leading his group out to the program. The reply was "We are going to stay in and continue working in the conference room. We will not be going outside."
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I used to work for a company that bid on construction tenders, usually worth between 30 and 300 million pounds. For one such bid, for a new school, we made sure to hire an architect with an extensive background in schools. One part of the bid involved this architect answered some questions from the council in a live interview format. He completely flubbed the interview, and seemed unable to answer very simple questions about school-building that even I knew the answer to. We lost the bid right after the interview, and had a sort of post-failure analysis meeting. I was a bit amazed at how badly our man had performed, but the older hands were completely unfazed:

"He probably got a call from one of the competitors in the night, offering him a few hundred grand to intentionally fail the interview, then a position with them if they got the bid. We'll probably do the same thing at the next round of bidding."
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I worked almost 20 years at a Fortune 500 high technology manufacturing company. After several years of poor performance a new CEO was brought in to turn things around. In late October, several months after he arrived, an All Managers meeting was called at which the new CEO talked about a number of changes which were going to be made.

A key component of his message was that "We are all in this together." One thing we would all be doing together was that there would be no Management Bonus Program for the year. As the CEO said, "None of us will receive a management bonus."

About five months later, while reading the fine print of the company's SEC report, I learned that corporate VP's and above had aactually received tens of thousands of dollars of cash and stock bonuses for the past year. They had done so because they were covered not by the Management Bonus Program but by the Executive Bonus Program.